This page went up before anybody got a grade. That is on purpose, and it is the whole point.
Nothing on this site carries a grade today. Not one letter, on one person. Everything below is the rubric, published in advance. It is a promise about how grading will work, not a description of something already running.
What is actually live right now: The Money Board (531 members of Congress — money raised, PAC share, votes cast, bills, real office contacts), 51 state report cards, and the Civics 101 lessons. All of it is the record and the citation. None of it is a verdict, a rank, or a score.
When the first grade is computed, this box changes and a dated row goes in the Changelog. Until you see that row, assume nobody has been graded, because nobody has.
If a rule appears here after somebody was already graded, the rule was written to fit the person. That is how you get a fake scorecard. So the rules go up first, in public, and then the same script runs on every member of Congress.
If we ever change a rule, the change goes in the Changelog at the bottom of this page with a date, and every affected card gets recomputed. No quiet edits.
A help desk. You ask about the stuff we have recorded, it answers from the record. It is not a watchdog with a verdict, and it is not here to tell you how to vote.
Everything on a report card sits in one of two boxes, and the boxes look different on the page so you can never confuse them.
A fact is something where two people who disagree about everything could run the same script and get the same number.
Attendance is a fact. Either they were there for the vote or they weren’t. The House Clerk wrote it down.
Anything requiring a judgment call lives here, in a separate box, labeled as opinion, with our reasoning shown.
Like the comments section on a school report card. “Does not work well with others” is a teacher’s opinion. It goes in the comment box. It does not get averaged into the math grade.
These two layers never get combined into one number. There is no overall GPA on this site. If you ever see a single score claiming to sum up an entire human being’s service, somebody is selling you something.
Report cards link to a government record. Explainers, lessons, and legal background — the stuff that isn’t a number — work differently, and this page is where that standard lives.
We tag #VERIFIED when a specific factual or legal claim has been checked
against a primary source — the actual statute, court opinion, or government record
— and the primary source is linked directly beside the tag. This is different from
#PAC_FUNDED or #HIGH_PAC_SHARE, which are our declared judgment
calls about where to draw a line. #VERIFIED makes no judgment call at all. It
only says: what we claimed the source says, the source actually says, checked on the date
shown.
We considered calling this tag #PROOF. We didn’t, on purpose.
“Proof” claims something is settled. What we can actually promise is narrower and
more honest: we checked, here is exactly what we checked it against, go look for yourself.
That is the whole platform in one tag.
Most scorecards blur this. We won’t.
“Rep. Smith missed 8.6% of votes” is a fact from the House Clerk. “8.6% missed votes equals a B” is our decision about where to draw the line. We picked it. Somebody reasonable could pick differently.
So every grade on this site shows the raw number next to the letter, always. If you disagree with our cut lines, the number is right there and you can grade it yourself.
| Letter | Meaning |
|---|---|
| A | Top 20% of the chamber on this metric, this Congress |
| B | Next 20% |
| C | Middle 20% |
| D | Next 20% |
| F | Bottom 20% |
We grade on the curve within the same chamber and the same Congress, so a member is compared to people doing the same job under the same conditions. A senator is never graded against a representative.
All House and Senate members. All computed the same way. Every number links to the government record it came from.
We tag #PAC_FUNDED at 40% or more of receipts from PACs,
and #HIGH_PAC_SHARE at 60% or more. We picked those numbers.
Someone reasonable could pick 35% or 50%. The raw percentage always renders beside the
tag so you can draw your own line.
| Depth | What was cited | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | Article + Section + Clause | “Article I, Section 8, Clause 3” |
| 2 | Article + Section | “Article I, Section 8” |
| 1 | Article or Amendment only | “Article I” |
| 0 | Preamble only, or no provision identified | “The Preamble” |
| — | No statement found in the record | (field empty) |
Two people who disagree about everything get the same depth number from the same statement. That is what makes it a fact.
Separately, and by our own decision, we flag some citations as general: depth 0 or 1 (a pointer with no Section), or depth 3 pointing only at the General Welfare Clause (Art. I, §8, cl. 1) or the Necessary and Proper Clause (Art. I, §8, cl. 18).
That second part is our opinion and we are saying so out loud. Clause 18 is as enumerated as any other clause in the Constitution. We flag it because by its own wording it depends on some other power — but a reasonable person could disagree, and if you do, the depth number is right there and you can ignore our flag entirely.
constitutionalAuthorityStatementText.People ask us to grade officials on how far they’ve strayed from the 1787 Constitution. We understand the impulse. Here is why we don’t, and what we do instead.
Why we don’t. “How constitutional was that vote?” has no measurable answer. Reasonable people, including Supreme Court justices, disagree about constitutional meaning constantly and in writing. Any number we assigned would be our opinion wearing a lab coat. We would be inventing a number and calling it math, and that is the one thing this site exists to not do.
What we do instead. We apply rules declared in advance, to whole categories of action, by script. Subject 6 is exactly that — a rule about citation specificity that runs identically on every House bill, written before we looked at whose bills it would flag.
That is the honest version of the constitutional question, and it is the only version we will publish.
Cabinet secretaries and White House officials have no roll-call votes, no campaign committee, no sponsored bills, and no Constitutional Authority Statements. Five of our six subjects don’t exist for them. Their record is a different shape — Senate confirmation vote, OGE Form 278e disclosures, congressional testimony, Inspector General reports. Grading them on a card built for legislators would produce a card full of blanks and one lonely metric, which tells you nothing.
Version 1.0 is House and Senate. A Cabinet card needs its own subjects, its own methodology page, and its own pre-declaration.
You typed a ZIP code and we showed you a district. Here is the honest caveat.
ZIP codes are mail routes, not places. The Postal Service invented them to deliver letters, not to draw boundaries. Roughly 15% of ZIP codes cross congressional district lines, and the Postal Service publishes no official map of ZIP areas at all.
We will never guess and present the guess as certain.
Every number on every card links to the government record it came from. If a number looks wrong, click it — you’ll land on the House Clerk, the Senate, the FEC, or Congress.gov, not on us. If you find an error, tell us. Corrections get logged in the Changelog with the date, what was wrong, and what it is now. We don’t quietly fix things.
We would rather tell you what’s missing than let you assume it’s covered.
When a card has nothing recorded on a subject, it says “not built yet” instead of showing a zero. A zero and an unknown are not the same thing, and we won’t print one where we mean the other.
| Version | Date | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | September 2, 2026 | No rule changed. Added the dated status box at the top of this page stating plainly that no official has been graded yet and that the rubric below is a declaration, not a running system. Added because the site went live this day and a reader could otherwise have believed grades already existed. A gap between what a page promises and what it does is the same problem as a wrong number. |
| 1.0 | August 1, 2026 | First publication. No official had been scored prior to this date. Six subjects declared. Grading curve declared. PAC-share cut lines declared at 40% and 60%. |
Every future change to a rule on this page gets a row here, and every affected card gets recomputed. If a row is missing, the change didn’t happen.